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What Keir Starmer needs is a decent slogan. The one he’s toying with – “Give Britain its future back” – doesn’t cut it as it lacks any tangible meaning to voters.
And with its echoes of the Back to the Future movies, is the DeLorean car really the image the Labour leader wants to project? Time magazine put the DeLorean on its list of the 50 worst cars of all time.
So how about something snappier such as “Life is calmer with Starmer” or “You won’t shed a tear under Keir”? No, you’re right. They’re rubbish too. They make our next PM sound like a psychoanalyst.
Time to turn to Tony Blair, the man already advising Starmer on election strategy and the master of the pithy phrase. When he came up with a slogan it meant something.
Keir Starmer is beating Rishi Sunak in national pollingPAWhat Blair had going for him in 1997 was an underlying political philosophy which guided everything he did, though admittedly it was one he nicked from US President Bill Clinton.
Clinton may not have been up to much in the good husband department, but he is the most brilliant politician I have ever met. So he is always worth a listen.
What Clinton and Blair came up with was Third Way politics, pinching the best bits from free market capitalism and social democracy and blending the two together.
The Tories had always traditionally been strong on such things as law and order, robust defence and economic management while the left scored on social welfare, health and education.
Blair upended that with such slogans as “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Tough punishment had been the mantra of the right while the social causes of it were the preserve of the left. That phrase showed how Blair could fuse them into one.
Similarly, “a hand up not a handout” went alongside Blair’s commitment to get 250,000 under 25s off benefits and into work. These weren’t empty words; they were the headlines on top of specific policies.
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Blair and Clinton came up with Third Way politics
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And it was Blair who paved the way for David Cameron who adapted New Labour’s Third Way playbook for his “compassionate Conservatism” and “Big Society”.
The Big Society was a sound plan which involved putting communities at its heart. It rested on taking personal responsibility, making the State an enabler rather than a provider and was underpinned by the idea that by looking after others we look after ourselves.
Cameron cited by way of example a project in the Midlands in which local residents got together to set up street patrols to drive out pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers “and turn what was a no-go zone into a desirable place to live.”
But he didn’t come up with a suitable slogan to encapsulate all this, which was why it never took off. Good ideas are not enough. They have to be articulated so as to be easily understood and Cameron never found a way to do it.
That’s what has gone wrong with Starmer’s plan for economic growth based on spending £28billion on a green industrial revolution. It needed to be promoted as less about net-zero and more about what it would put in people’s pockets.
Rishi Sunak will keep beating him up unless Starmer can come up with a plan
PA
It left the Labour leader open to the Tory attack line that it would mean higher taxes, which it wouldn’t because the money was going to be borrowed instead.
Starmer shouldn’t have abandoned this. It played into the trap the Tories laid for him with their second torpedo once the scheme was scrapped – that he hasn’t got a plan. Expect to hear more jibes about Mr Flip-Flop.
If Starmer gets the heebie-jeebies each time a stinging Tory tactic strikes home he is going to have a miserable General Election campaign. That’s why he should have held his nerve.
It is true economic circumstances have changed since shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced this policy in September, 2021. Debt interest repayments more than quadrupled from £3billion a month that December to nearly £13billion in June last year.
But they were back down to £4billion before Christmas. And Labour cannot know what the economic climate might be like in 2027 when the spending was due to click in.
The party needed to make more of the financial benefits. Green industry is the direction of global travel and if Britain had led the way in developing the technology it could have generated £1trillion worth of business for the UK.
It was also the vehicle to fulfil Starmer’s promise of the highest growth in the G7.
Quadrupling offshore wind, trebling solar power, and doubling onshore wind could have reduced household energy bills by £1,400 a year and created 500,000 new jobs.
Starmer says he can still do all these things without the money, but it is difficult to see how, and Rishi Sunak will keep beating him up unless he can come up with a plan pronto.
And find a slogan. Otherwise, all he will be left with is: “Labour blows with the wind.”
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